Wind Farm Cable Connection Layout Optimization Using a Genetic Algorithm and Integer Linear Programming

This work addresses the wind farm (WF) optimization layout considering several substations. It is given a set of wind turbines jointly with a set of substations, and the goal is to obtain the optimal design to minimize the infrastructure cost and the cost of electrical energy losses during the wind farm lifetime. The turbine set is partitioned into subsets to assign to each substation. The cable type and the connections to collect wind turbine-produced energy, forwarding to the corresponding substation, are selected in each subset. The technique proposed uses a genetic algorithm (GA) and an integer linear programming (ILP) model simultaneously. The GA creates a partition in the turbine set and assigns each of the obtained subsets to a substation to optimize a fitness function that corresponds to the minimum total cost of the WF layout. The fitness function evaluation requires solving an ILP model for each substation to determine the optimal cable connection layout. This methodology is applied to four onshore WFs. The obtained results show that the solution performance of the proposed approach reaches up to 0.17% of economic savings when compared to the clustering with ILP approach (an exact approach).